CHILD OF FORTUNE

Chapter 7

As I dashed from the Public, my intellect was far too occluded by storm clouds of rage and embarrassment to lay any rational plan; I sought nothing more cunning than to keep the two Gypsy Jokers within range of my sight. Indeed, I did not even think this thought with any clarity until I realized that I was in fact tracking them, up out of the little canyon, through the woods, around the margin of a lake, and then into the narrow streets of a residential arrondissement of rambling wooden houses, This vecino, though not exactly bustling, still was crowded enough to screen the tracker from the sight of the prey, especially since the two Gypsy Jokers simply ambled along with never a look backwards, entirely unaware that I was following.

The practical task of following the two miscreants at a more or less constant distance of some fifty meters soon assumed a mantric quality which began to calm my spirit and clarify my mind, These two arch urchins were, after all, not quite so clever as they thought, for there they were, no doubt, making their way back to their lair, and I need do nothil1g more arcane than follow them home to reach my goal.

Alas, even as I was beginning to congratulate myself on my acumen, my simple plan was laid low by an equally simple flaw that I had entirely failed to consider, a false assumption generated by my own indigency, to wit, that my quarries, like myself, lacked the wherewithal to travel by Rapide.

But after no more than half an hour of this stealthy pursuit, my quarries, as if they had been tantalizing me all along, strolled quite cavalierly into a Rapide station whose entrance was crafted in the form of a tree, and by the time I had followed them within, were long since gone, somewhere, no doubt, under the rainbow, leaving me once more to play the fool.

For want of any further course of action, I stood there ill the empty Rapide station trying to gather my wits about me. For want of any other coherent cerebral content, my mind's ear began to cycle through the taunting doggerel with which the Gypsy Jokers had answered my entirely straightforward inquiries. "Where are the Gypsy Jokers to be found? Over the river and through the woods, where the sun never sets and the moon never shines, first star on the left and straight on till morning, somewhere under the rainbow ..."

Could this be something more than meaningless blather? Indeed was this not Edoku, where the only practical means of reciting the lay of the land was just such a skein of imagery? Vraiment, there were as many venues as not where the sun never set and the moon never shone, and as for rivers, woods, ersatz stars, and places of perpetual morning, they were all as common on this planet as Bittersweet Jungle on Glade ...

But the rainbow ... Since Edoku was entirely lacking in natural meteorology, such an effect, if it existed here, would be the result of artifice, and, given the penchant of the Edojin for abolishing the natural cycle of the elements, would like as not be a permanent rather than a transient phenomenon. Moreover, given the penchant of the Edojin for novelty, there might be only one such feature on the entire planet ...

It would be easy enough to find out. Merely insert my chip into the slot of the nearest Bubble, order up the list of "Scenic Meteorology," and --

Merde!

For want of the smallest quantum of credit on my chip, or even a few coins of ruegelt to exchange for same, my brilliant chain of deduction led only to the most exquisite state of frustration!

At this karmic nexus, fate, or may hap mere random chance, chose to cross my path with a catalytic agent sufficient unto transmuting my state of forlorn impotence into a reckless, not to say courageous, determination to at long last become an active agent of my own destiny with the single practical means at my disposal, the ring of tantric power that I wore upon my finger.

A man with skin tinted pale white and dressed all in green velvet had entered the station and was in the process of seating himself in a nearby Bubble. The specificity of his person, however, was entirely without relevance, for it was the generality of his gender which impelled my action -- was this not a male of the species, and had not the time finally come to test the power over same of the ring that my father had placed upon my finger, to see if Moussa was the true daughter of Shasta and Leonardo?

Thumbing the Touch ring on and screwing up my courage, I accosted the fellow, who greeted the approach of a rather obvious mendicant with a moue of distaste. "Pardon me, good sir, if I may have a --"

"Ruegelt for Children of Fortune arimasen! Raus, urchin!"

This reaction had not been exactly unanticipated; au contraire, it allowed me to lay a gentle hand on the juncture of neck and clavicle in the form of a polite gesture of restraint, as I laughed goodnaturedly and said: "you mistake my intent. I seek not alms, only your aid in settling a wager, and it will cost you not a single credit."

"A ... wager ...?" he stammered, gazing up at me with an altered expression, which seemed not to be entirely the result of my words, seeing as how a red flush was now clearly visible under his alabaster skin.

"Just so," I said, now allowing my thumb to brush upwards and contact a more sensitive point near the juncture of jaw and throat, "the object of the wager is whether or not a rainbow exists in Great Edoku."

"Je ... je ... wakarimasen ... know not ..." he blithered, not taking his eyes from mine, and beginning to gape somewhat foolishly. I, on the other hand, took a quick sidelong glance at the crotch of his pantaloons, and verified in the firmest terms possible that this first test of my father's cunning invention was thusfar proceeding nominally.

"Ah, but this knows, ne?" I said, leaning over his seated figure, removing my hand from his shoulder, and chancing to brush the back of it against his thigh in the process of laying the palm of it on the screen of the Bubble; en passant, I could feel his whole body twitch. "It would cost you nothing to insert your chip and inquire, and I, alas, am suffering, shall we say, a temporary embarrassment of funds ..."

He regarded me with a face upon which I could clearly read the conflict between the cynical intellect and the natural man. On the one hand, he must now realize that he had been accosted by a mendicant of some kind after all, but on the other hand, his lingam was informing him that he had been smitten by an instant and primal lust for same, which, as far as he knew, this innocent young creature had done nothing to provoke. It but required a slight act of boldness to consolidate my position; Leonardo's puissance as a mage of personal enhancement devices was about to be confirmed.

I put on the best expression of innocent childish implorement that I could muster under the circumstances. "Oh, please!" I cooed like a babe, touching an imploring palm to his cheek as a child might do in the act of begging a sweet from a favorite uncle.

I could feel him breaking into a light sweat. He squirmed on the seat of the' Bubble. Was it my imagining that he stifled an incipient moan? "P-p-porque no?" he sighed throatily, in a voice entirely inappropriate to converse with a favorite niece. With a somewhat trembling hand, as if all too cognizant of the imagery of the gesture, he inserted his chip into the slot. "Scenic M-meteorology ..." he commanded.

The screen began to scroll. "Alpine mist ... blue clouds ... fog banks ... hurricane ... neige ... rainbow ..."

Voila!

Elated by the tentative confirmation of my deductions, emboldened further by the fruit of my first act of courage, flush with the success of my first employment of the Touch, determined to see how far I could push my luck, and not without a certain honest girlish pleasure, I cried "I win!" and threw my arms around his neck in a hug.

When he moaned aloud and returned the embrace with a force and passion that had nothing to do with childish glee, the die was cast.

Much later in life, perusal of certain obscure historical texts revealed to my bemusement that certain ancient Terrestrial cultures held bizarre beliefs concerning the granting of sexual favors which the modern mind must find entirely outre, if not mentally diseased. In these cultures, it was actually held that amatory pleasures were to be withheld by the femme of the species as a commodity to be traded for a contract of marriage under which the homme was required to provide economic sustenance. Naturellement, such artificially created scarcity provided a strong sellers' market for tantric performance such as present practitioners of the art could not imagine in their wildest dreams, But the paradoxical result was that the tantric performer was held in low esteem, for by and large, these "putains" enjoyed a clientele of such uncritical avidity for simple sexual release that the mere granting of crude sexual favors was sufficient, by and large, to command a living wage, and diligent study and true artistry were almost entirely unnecessary to the successful "whore."

While the young girl who then proceeded to finger the vertebrae of the fellow's neck like a flute, eliciting a music of sighs, groans, and mutters, lacked the benefits of this historical perspective, I did have the instinctual understanding that the electronic enhancement of my tantric energies, combined with the immediacy of his desire, would be sufficient to overcome my lack of serious study and artistic accomplishment relative to what was available in the palaces of pleasure of Edoku, much as the rude finger food of the Sparkies, available on the spot at the moment of impulse, was sufficient to satisfy the whim of sophisticated Edojin, who, under circumstances of more formal and critical consideration, would have eschewed it for haute cuisine.

"1 would love to see the rainbow," I told him forthrightly to his panting face. "It is, in fact, at present my heart's desire. A few credits of your largesse would be sufficient to grant it, ne?"

Under the circumstances, the inquiring cock of his eyebrow was a mere nicety, a formality which I answered in kind. "In return for which, I would be most willing to grant your present heart's desire," I said. "Not to say that of your lingam," I added, lightly Touching the organ in question.

When, bewitched and bedazzled, and cognizant of same, he still managed a certain expression of niggardly uncertainty, I told him, "I sense that you are a man of honor. Should you look me in the eye afterward and declare in honesty that the experience was not worth the few coins of ruegelt I require, I will cheerfully forgo my fee."

With that, mingy uncertainty was reconciled with the natural man. "Well spoken!" he declared. "A secluded bower desu, only short walk away. Vamanos!"

To this bucolic boudoir we forthwith repaired, doffed only the minimum necessary garments to effect the union of lingam and yoni, and forthrightly consummated our transaction. Once I had him in my full embrace so that I was easily and openly able to finger the full range of his spinal chakras and even more intimate plexes of his kundalinic neuroanatomy, he was speedily transported to and held at such sustained and heightened levels of bliss that I was confident that I would secure the credits I sought unless I was in the arms of an utter villain and churl.

Moreover, I found myself experiencing pleasures entirely divorced from anticipated pecuniary gain. For one thing, a man who has been granted the ecstasy of such full kundalinic arousal becomes a more tireless and unselfish lover, for an- other, the premiere performance always has a certain spiritual piquancy for a tantric artist, and perhaps best of all, for the first time in my young life, I could bask in the moral satisfaction of providing fair value given for value received, of doing an actual job of work, and doing it well.

***

Vraiment, such sincerity and powerful if not entirely polished craft did not go without its just reward, which is to say that after I had pleasured him to the sweet razor-edge of exhaustion, he readily and in good faith agreed to return to the Rapide station and send me on my way via his largesse.

And so, thanks to my father's providence, my own pluck, and the first piece of honest labor I had performed in my life, a few minutes later I emerged from a Rapide station concealed within a large stone statue aping a piece of rude primitive art to stand beneath the rainbow's grand and palely shining spectral arch.

The immediate vecino in which I found myself was an arrondissement of fanciful towers set in an alpine meadow between two entirely contrasting ranges of mountains. On my right hand, jagged desert buttes broiled and flashed in the noonday sun while a mighty cataract poured over the edge of the highest cliff to crash against a rocky riverbed in immense billows of mist and foam. On my left hand were green, wooded, rolling hills sprinkled with manses and houses, reminding me, somehow, of the Hightowns of Nouvelle Orlean at early twilight, with the lights of men outshining the sparse stars, and even a bank of fog hovering over the distant ridgeline.

Overarching the intervening afternoon valley was the immense preternaturally brilliant rainbow, which seemed to arise from the mists at the foot of the cataract and bridge the sky to the fogbank behind the wooded hills.

The architecture of the large urbanized area beneath the rainbow was in its way no less extravagant than the style of the landscape in which it had been set. The cityscape was dominated by scores of tall, flowing, indeed somehow organically shaped, towers of multicolored glasses, all fusing and melting and whirling into each other, as if the rainbow itself were mirrored ill a slick of oil poured over mounds of gelati. The ground floors of these buildings were given over to all manner of restaurants, tavernas, boutiques, cafes, and the like, all open to the vie of the streets, which were paved not with stone nor yet gold, but a mosslike grass that was an arabesque of intermingled greens, reds, blues, and yellows.

These streets, moreover, were fairly choked with pedestrian traffic, the usual Edojin throngs in their tinted skills, bizarre coiffures, and extravagant garments, but more to the point, a liberal sprinkling of finger-food hawkers, wandering musicians, trinket peddlers, und so weiter, accoutred with items of the Cloth of Many Colors of the Gypsy Jokers.

***

Having come this far on impulse and boldness, I was now impelled towards a certain caution, or at any rate it seemed most politic not to call undue attention to myself until I had reconnoitered the territory and formulated a plan of action. Judging from my single experience with the manners of the tribe towards Children of Fortune of my lowly station, it would avail me nothing to simply accost the nearest Gypsy Joker and demand an audience with Pater Pan, nor would I likely gain anything but the rudest rejection if I managed to locate their encampment and grandly announce my availability as a member of the tribe and paramour of its domo. Even fresh from my triumph at the Rapide station, and basking in not-undeserved self-congratulation at my own cleverness, I knew I needed a strategem somewhat more subtle than that.

Fortunately, it was not long before the need to visit a Public arose, and upon being reminded of this biological imperative operating with inevitable regularity in my own quotidian existence even when my attention was focused on far weightier and loftier matters, I realized that this Pater Pan, in carnation of the eternal Child of Fortune and perfect master of the Gypsy Jokers or not, would also sooner or later need to relieve himself even as mortal men.

My next step, therefore, was first to locate the nearest Public and deal with the biological necessities, and then to utilize the lore and gossip current in the society thereof to locate those Public Service Stations most commonly frequented by the Gypsy Jokers.

The former required nothing more arcane than inquiring of the first person in a gray smock that I saw, who straightaway directed me to the usual blockhouse, which had been concealed in plain sight all along behind a tall hedge of brilliant blue flowers screening off an alcove set between two nearby buildings. The latter was merely a matter of informing the denizens thereof that I was new to the vecino, planned to tarry awhile, and therefore would be pleased to be informed of the various locations of the Publics therein.

Vraiment, the matter proved even easier than I had hoped, for the greeners of this vecino, having for the most part been drawn thither by the mystique of the Gypsy Jokers, spoke of little else, for indeed there was little else to speak of.

For one thing, the Gypsy Jokers were the only organized tribe in the area, a monopoly they enforced not so much by threats of force implied or otherwise as by their puissant mastery of all the arts of gathering ruegelt save thievery; they were simply too good at all they did for competing tribes to survive.

As for tribes of pickpockets and pilferers such as the Way- faring Strangers, these avoided the vecino entirely, for the cunning Pater Pan had endeared the Gypsy Jokers to the local Edojin by a lucrative stratagem. Whether engaged in the peddling of food or crafts, street theater, ruespieling, or any of the other main Gypsy Joker enterprises, all members of the tribe kept a sharp watch for thieves and pickpockets at work, and upon spying same, used secret voice and hand signals to form up a posse of apprehension out of their own numbers. Since such a posse was empowered to confiscate everything in the possession of a thief caught in the act down to his clothing, it was the Gypsy Jokers, famed among the locals for honesty, who paradoxically reaped the only gain from what isolated acts of pilferage might occur within their sphere of operation.

Naturellement, the local greeners could think of little else but gaining entree to the Gypsy Jokers, and in the matter of recruitment as well, Pater Pan had evolved a method which combined moral justice with financial gain. A Gypsy Joker was required to be a person of pluck, resource, and wit, ne, and what required more of these qualities than the securing of ruegelt by a lone Child of Fortune in a vecino where the competition for same was the Gypsy Jokers themselves? Therefore, anyone might gain membership in the Gypsy Jokers by the simple expedient of appearing before Pater Pan and donating one hundred coins of ruegelt to the tribe as a fee of admission.

Verdad, the accumulation of such a vast fortune was far easier said than done, and, moreover, the bizarre notion of forking over same to a fellow who clearly felt no pecuniary pain struck me as an outrageous imposition, and one with which I certainly had no intention of trafficking.

Nevertheless, one aspect of this dastardly ploy fell ill quite neatly with my own chosen strategy: Pater Pan made fairly regular appearances at a Public located behind the waterfall, ostensibly for the purpose of bathing his worthy person, but in point of practical fact in order to make himself readily available to the fortunate and foolish few able and willing to cross his palm with ruegelt.

***

The Public behind the waterfall proved, naturellement, no different from the many others that I had previously frequented, save that it remained continually crowded with greeners who seemed to throng it for no more practical purpose than to catch a glimpse of the Great One or at least members of his entourage. For in the four days that I lounged therein awaiting his advent with an impatience that stepwise transmuted itself into an entirely unjustified personal pique against him for his tardiness, I encountered no one possessed of any sum remotely approaching the required entrance fee, and, I learned, even as I had surmised, the acceptance of one of our lowly number into the Gypsy Jokers was an event of such rarity that each such occurrence assumed the aura of legend.

Nevertheless, while patience had never been my dominant virtue, if there was one art in which Nouvelle Orlean had provided me with a useful education it was that of lying in ambush for the masculine prey of my choosing to cross my path, for all he knew at random, and so I persevered in my stalk.

Eventually, inevitably, my quarry approached the water hole, accompanied, as I was to learn was his custom, by several female members of his pride, accoutred with items of the Cloth of Many Colors and mooning expressions continually cast in his direction.

This comparatively drab entourage, however, scarcely impinged upon the sphere of my attention, for Pater Pan himself lit up my sky the moment I laid eyes on him, a phenomenon which I was to learn was hardly uncommon to the sisters of my gender, and one which he himself did nothing to discourage.

Strange to say under the circumstances, it was his garb which first drew my attention, for Pater Pan affected a costume which even on Edoku drew the eye in amazement, and which on a lesser being would have made him a ludicrous figure.

This was the Traje de Luces of Public Service Station lore, and upon actually seeing it worn by this noble creature, I could understand why no words could describe the effect justly. Pater Pan wore a loose blouson of the Cloth of Many Colors, open like a sleeved cloak over his bare chest, and crowned with a thespic high collar, a garment composed of hundreds of assorted patches of old cloth, yet somehow a royal robe rather than a ragamuffin's rags when worn by this lordly specimen. Similarly, the tight breeches which seemed expertly tailored to hug every curve and bulge of his lower anatomy were the same random patchwork of colors and textures.

Naturellement, only a noble and daunting visage could rescue such an apparition from the realm of farce; this Pater Pan possessed, and just as clearly, he knew it. His hair was golden yellow and worn in a carefully groomed shoulder-length mane, and he affected a beard of the same color and style to complete the haloing nimbus. All that was visible of his facial features was an aquiline nose, full sensuous lips, high forehead, noble brow, and piercing yet merry blue eyes; artfully outlined by the golden mane and partially concealed by the beard, this face seemed at once youthful and ancient, in truth quite literally ageless.

Ah, he was perfect, a persona artfully self-crafted to express a proud perfection of the masculine spirit within, and oh, did every step and gesture declare that this work of art was his own most avid aficionado!

Indeed it was this very air of utterly self-assured narcissism which both caused my knees to tremble and rescued me from mere paralyzed gaping; he was beautiful, he was king of this particular little world, and I wanted him. On the other hand, he also seemed a paragon of ego, a challenge to every female within range of his charisma, the fellow all-too-obviously knew it, and therefore I must have him as my conquest.

Only some time later did I learn that the projection of precisely this determination into the spirit of the generality of my gender was his most puissant erotic tactic.

Be that as it may, while every other female in the Public was foolishly engaged in watching this brilliant cock parade and preen, Moussa Shasta Leonardo retained the wit to consider strategy.

In this regard, my experience in the Rapide station admirably served to engorge my confidence, for I now had proven by practical application of same that the claims made by my father for the tantric puissance of the ring on my finger owed little to hyperbole; all I had to do was get my hands on him and science would put even such a man as this in my power.

Pater Pan, so it was said, customarily abluted himself as part of these visitations; this Public being so habitually crowded, the ten shower stalls at the far end of the room were usually well occupied, and queuing was common, though no doubt lesser beings would vacate at the pleasure of the monarch.

However, fate, or destiny, or mere random chance, once more favored me with a minor smile of patronage. Perusing the bare shanks visible below the doors of the shower stalls, I saw that two of them, side by side, were now empty.

Seizing this opportunity, I entered the one on the right, doffed all my clothing, hung it on the hooks provided, turned on the overhead shower, took up the bar of soap from its alcove, and waited. If my luck held, and my quarry was not so haughty as to eject a bather from an occupied stall for sake of status when another was empty, Pater Pan would soon be naked in the stall beside me. The partitions between the stalls ended at knee height; it would be a simple matter to drop my soap so that it slithered into the adjacent stall, and then, in the innocent act of groping ...

So it is written, so it was done. Within less than ten minutes, I heard the adjacent shower stall door open, then swing shut, and by perusing the patchwork-clad legs below the partition, I knew that it was he. A moment later I was presented with the sight of trim shanks lightly dusted with golden hair, a delightful sight to my eyes, though the feet depending therefrom were no more objects of esthetic refinement than those of any other male of my previous or future acquaintance.

I waited for the sounds of his ablutions and was treated as well to the wordless off-key singing so common to the bathing male of our species when he believes no critical ear is at hand. Then I activated the Touch, lathered my bar of soap to the required degree of slickness, reached down below the partition, shouted "Merde!" and shot the soap beneath it and into his stall with a squeeze of my hand.

Forthwith, I squatted down for sake of clear vision of my target, but began groping about at arm's length in the manner of someone trying to retrieve the errant soap by blind touch alone.

While neither the foot nor the calf is exactly an erogenous zone rich in surface connections to the kundalinic neurology, there is a nerve trunk running behind the tendon of the heel up the leg and into the groin, and this I "chanced" to grasp quite firmly in the act of attempting to recover my soap.

I could feel a tremor ripple up his leg as I did so and heard a grunt of surprise with certain subtle undertones which led me to believe that the stimulus had indeed penetrated to the target area.

"Pardon," I said, not removing my hand, "I was looking for my soap."

"That's no soap, muchacha," said a rich masculine voice with the considerable savoir faire necessary under the circumstances to affect a certain jocular tone, but not enough to suppress a husky quaver. Nor did he pull his foot from my grasp.

"Vraiment?" I said archly, running my hand gropingly up the inner surface of his calf, past his knee, and a few inches up his thigh, which was as far as my arm would reach. "1 know it's in there somewhere."

At this, he let forth an honest sensual moan, and forthwith contrived to bend his knees, leaning forward and downward into my Touch, so that my hand slid up his thigh to brush against his cojones and lingam.

"Quelle chose!" I squealed in great mock consternation while feeling the slickly hard object as if to verify my perception. "That's not a piece of soap either!"

At this, he fairly shouted in ecstasy, and 1 released my grip and withdrew my arm, sensing that further such ministrations might bring matters to a premature conclusion.

There was a long moment of silence as we both stood there separated by the partition with only our calves and feet visible to each other.

"A saucy wench indeed!" the male voice said in a tone that seemed to convey a somewhat false composure. "Who are you?"

"Cabeza de caga!" I shouted in equally insincere outrage and wounded innocence. "Who am I? Who are you to take such liberties with a fresh young virgin?"

From the other side of the partition came a strangled gurgling sound halfway between a cough and a laugh. "You really don't know the who of the what you just grabbed?" he said somewhat guardedly.

"Do you imagine me to be possessed of such arcane powers that I can deduce your identity from the sight of your feet and the size of your lingam?"

"To judge from certain other powers you seem to possess, it wouldn't surprise me, lady fair ..." he mused. "Well, know then that you've just had the high honor of giving the goose to Pater Pan, my ah, fresh young virgin!" he added grandly.

"Who?" I replied, as if the name had not quite registered.

"Pater Pan," he replied with some vexation.

"Bien," I said diffidently. "And you have been favored however inadvertently with the touch of Moussa Shasta Leonardo."

"You speak as if that makes it a fair trade," he complained.

"Is it not?"

"Merde!" he muttered. "1 am Pater Pan, girl."

"You speak as if that statement bore some cosmic significance."

"You put me not on? You really don't know who I am?" he said, the tone of his voice betraying a melange of outraged ego and charmed bemusement at such unaccustomed ignorance.

"Should I?"

"For sure!" he said much more genially. "But perhaps we should continue this seance face to face and belly to belly ..."

"Porque no?" I said after some hesitation. "I have no pressing affairs for the next hour or so, and if your company amuses me half so much as it does yourself, the time will be well spent."

With that, the discourse temporarily ended, as we toweled ourselves dry, donned our clothing, exited our respective shower stalls, and then met face to face. He looked me up and down appraisingly for a moment and then favored me with a lordly smile of measured approval.

I for my part ran my eyes up and down his patchwork-clad body while contriving to fix an expression of suppressed mirth on my face: "Drole," I finally said dryly.

"Drole?" he exclaimed. "Is that all you have to say upon first confrontation with the full magnificence of my being?"

"Surely you are not unaware of the jocular effect of your ... ah, costume!"

He eyed me narrowly. I regarded him in kind. Then we both laughed and the congruent expressions, while hardly changing in content, became something shared, as if our spirits had touched and at any rate found each other equally outrageous.

"Perhaps this duet should continue without an audience?" he suggested, discovering via sidelong glances that in fact everyone in the Public, and in particular the feminine entourage with which he had entered, was now regarding this scene with avid, though in the case of the female Gypsy Jokers, not quite amused, attention.

"Indeed," I agreed, clasping his hand and causing his eyes to widen in lustful amazement. "I find such shyness in a man not without a certain boyish charm."

Thus did we make our exit, hand in hand, and his beginning to grow quite sweaty, to a certain buzz and mutter which I for my part could not refrain from taking as applause for what under the circumstances I considered my own masterly performance.

***

The Public was hidden behind the great cataract which tumbled from the lip of the desert butte high above, and close by was a cave in the face of the cliff into which Pater Pan led me. This proved to be the entrance to a lift tube which took us to the top of the butte. The landscape above bore no sane geographical relationship to the appearance of the plateau as seen from below.

Indeed the top of the butte was not a plateau at all but a great shallow bowl or "natural" amphitheater hidden from below by a ringwall of rock so as not to spoil the effect of a stark desert landscape when viewed from afar. For in fact here was a lush green garden, a landscape of tiny rolling green hills and secluded dimpled little dells, many with small ponds at their bottoms interconnected by a tracery of burbling brooks that flowed in winding paths around the hills and through the valleys. The hillcrests, moreover, were planted with copses of low trees heavy with a profuse variety of colorful and fragrant blooms, so that each little valley was a secluded perfumed boudoir, complete with private bathing pool. What lay underfoot was not so much lawn as something green with more the texture of a deep-pile animal pelt than vegetation, the air was the temperature of the body's heat, though gentled by breezes, and the gravity gradient was such that we fairly drifted along on the tips of our toes.

There was no mistaking the nature of the pleasures for which such a garden had been crafted, nor, therefore, was there any mistaking the forthright purpose of the man who had brought me there.

Nevertheless, I was determined to retain the initiative, and so, as soon as we had secluded ourselves in a dell by one of the crystal pools, I straightaway made my own bold suggestion. "Since our baths were interrupted, let us now continue our ablutions." And so saying, without waiting for his assent, I removed my clothes and displayed my nakedness for his delectation.

He stood there fully clothed for a moment as I regarded him with an impatient expression, hands on hips. "Well?" I demanded. "What is it that you see which has turned you to stone?"

"Yo no se, " he said with a shake of his head, "but somehow I doubt it is any fresh young virgin."

So saying, he began to remove his clothing, and then followed me into the pool, into which I had leapt before he could complete his disrobing.

The water too proved to be heated to hot blood's temperature, and in this frank and heady brew, there was a minimum of coy thrashing and splashing before we found each other embracing. Once our lips had met in a kiss and our bodies had touched, the niceties of the chase were fairly concluded, and when I searched out his lingam and treated it to an open and electronically enhanced caress of lingering duration, he trembled, and moaned, and writhed in my grasp, and then snatched me up in his arms, carried me out of the water in a headlong stumble, threw me on the spongy ground, and proceeded to essay a mighty proof indeed of his considerable manly virtues.

Vraiment, he was tender and indefatigable, surely as schooled in the finer points of the tantric arts and the chakras of sensual pleasure as my mother herself, and never before or since have I known such a demon lover.

Yet even while given over entirely to the pleasures his puissance afforded, I was never transported so far beyond guile as to eschew my determination to display for him the unique ecstasies available to him via the graces of Moussa Shasta Leonardo and to be found in the arms of no other lover.

I ran my fingers up and down the cordillera of his spine, flashing tantric lightning from peak to peak. I Touched secret places in the root of him, I felt him lingering on the knife edge of ecstasy as I did so, as if by act of will or the iron control of a perfect master, he might remain there forever. This hubric self-control I allowed him to exercise for a goodly while to my own considerable pleasure, and then, as if to demonstrate who was the mistress of tantric power and who the acolyte, I suddenly thrust my preternaturally puissant finger into the very seat of kundalinic intimacy, and he uttered an orgasmic howl fit to rouse the dead if such might be sleeping in a nearby bower.

Nor were our exercises then at all concluded, for, aroused to an egoless state of tantric communion on the one hand, and a contest of loverly wills which had everything to do with ego on the other, we proceeded through countless tantric configurations, half a dozen cusps at the least, each determined to master the other via the giving of a surfeit of pleasure, not to say outlasting the rival in a contest of sheer endurance.

Pater for his part seemed possessed of a stamina and skill far beyond anything I had previously imagined possible to the masculine anatomy, and at length I was fairly trembling with a surfeit of ecstasy and panting with fatigue. Nevertheless, mighty though he was far beyond my fleshly power to outlast, I was possessed of an entirely unsporting advantage which no mother's son could in the end overmaster; utterly spent physically, I needed move no more than my finger to have him crying out once more.

And so at length, at great length, vraiment at entirely admirable length, it was the great Pater Pan who rolled over on his back, heaving and puffing, and cried: "Enough! What are you doing to me, girl?"

"Surrendering my virginity," I giggled. "Has anything out of the ordinary happened?" I said archly. "I am entirely inexperienced in these matters. Is it not always thus for a virile fellow like yourself with all the lovers you are so obviously accustomed to having throw themselves at your feet?"

"If you are an inexperienced virgin, then I am the Queen of the May," Pater said, raising the upper half of his body into a seated position, hunching forward, and regarding me with a certain post- coital skepticism which his hormonal metabolism had not previously permitted. "Jive me not, Moussa Shasta Leonardo, who are you, what is the nature of your game ... and what sparks this strange power?"

Still playing the naif as closely as possible, I took this as a mere suggestion to exchange name tales, a natural nicety under the circumstances, and presented him with a somewhat edited version, which is to say that I styled Leonardo in a general way as a mage of electronic arts, without feeling the need to mention the subject of personal enhancement devices.

After I had finished, Pater Pan seemed to chew it over in silence for a moment, as if sensing that I had not been entirely forthcoming. "So your mother is a tantric healer and performer?" he finally said. "Then you admit that your profession of naivete in these matters was less than the whole and nothing but truth?"

I laughed. I shrugged. "Naturellement, I was jesting," I owned." As you have had occasion to experience, I have actually had no little schooling in my mother's science."

"For sure," said Pater Pan appraisingly, "for a girl of your age and relative unsophistication, you seem to have a decent enough knowledge of the lay of the man."

"A decent enough knowledge!" I exclaimed in outrage. "Is that the best you have to say for my tantric performance after what you have just experienced?"

He laughed, but only briefly. Then he fixed me with those piercing blue eyes and spoke in a tone of voice that somehow convinced me of his veracity despite the absolutely outrageous import of his words.

"While I am not the sort of creepy-crawlie who scribes a running tally, by conservative estimate, I have granted my favors to some several thousand women on at least a hundred planets over a span of several centuries. Sure, and these have ranged from babes admittedly snatched from their cradles to veritable hagdom, and have included courtesans of great renown, tantric maestras and low putains, bumbling virgins, and every form of feminine life between, and on worlds of every level of sensual sophistication from crabbed puritanism to a hedonic excess that would make Edoku seem like a rest home for celibates. Therefore, while my overwhelming modesty may forbid me to judge my own prowess as a cocksman, when it comes to judging feminine performance, I am The Man, the greatest living connoisseur in all the worlds of men."

At this grossly overblown yet somehow sincere and almost believable boast, I was entirely at a loss for words. Pater Pan, au contraire, as I was to learn, never suffered this affliction, and was always more than willing and able to step into a conversational breach.

"Therefore," he went on, "I put you not down when I declare that in my expert critical opinion, while your actual level of tantric artistry is comfortably above the mean, your chops and moves can in no way adequately account for what I just experienced, which was probably the numero uno erotic experience of my entire long life."

Well how was a girl to take that? On the one hand, this puffed-up creature was relegating my personal performance to a level little above mediocrity , and on the other hand he was declaring that I had pleased him like no other lover! In truth, of course, it was the artistry of Leonardo to which he paid his extravagant homage, but I was hardly in a position or mood to admit to that!

Once more, however, Pater Pan's loquacity was more than equal to the task of discounting my silence. "So what I want to know is how in the flaming heart of a million suns such a thing can be possible!" he exclaimed. "What is this magic? How did you do it? And more to the point, perhaps, can you do it again?"

At this, I found my tongue and regained the composure of a certain mastery of the strategic situation." As to the latter," I said slyly, "that is for you to discover if you can charm or bargain me into the attempt. As for the former, surely an innocent naif such as myself, possessed, as you declare, of no overwhelming erotic artistry, is entitled to retain her one poor little secret in the presence of such a puissant mythic personage as the great Pater Pan."

"So now you admit that you knew who I was all along!" I shrugged. "1 have heard some ridiculous and hyperbolic tales which only a fool would credit," I admitted. "But I would rather hear your name tale from your own noble mouth. Have I not told you mine?"

Pater Pan smiled, gave a lofty toss of his golden-maned head. "The full tale of my name would take years to recount," he said grandly.

"No doubt," I replied dryly, "but surely a fellow who by his own admission has had congress with several thousand women has in the course of time and necessity evolved a suitably condensed version for just such occasions as this."

"Vraiment," Pater admitted. "If you are willing to content yourself with a pale shadow of the full magnificence ..."

"This I am grudgingly willing to endure," I told him. "Proceed, kudasai."

***

"I am Pater Pan. famed throughout the worlds of men, or at least wherever Children of Fortune walk the Yellow Brick Road of freedom," he declared grandly, "and this is both my chosen freenom and my identity entire, for long ago, before the Second Starfaring Age was born, before the Ark's first Spark, before the Age of Space itself, truth be told before the memory of this avatar who now speaks began, my paternom and maternom I tossed into the void with all the maya-bound ties chaining my eternal spirit to the Great Wheel.

"So say that my mother was an Arkie and a Rom, a Hippie Queen and a Princess of the Night, and say that my father was an Indian brave or Bodhidharma or Chaka Zulu or the Fliegende Hollander himself, maya, maya, for the spirit of Pater Pan was born before yours truly crawled blinking from some mortal mother's womb and will live on when this second Starfaring Age is nothing but a dim legend of the prehistoric past.

"Vraiment, I chose not the freenom Pater Pan in homage to the name of the spirit, rather did the spirit of the name choose me to carry its torch forward into our Age, for Pater Pan was born before the first ape climbed down from our ancestral trees to wander the plains of Earth. I was the very song which drew that dim creature out\",f the forest of ignorance to take his first halting steps on the Yellow Brick Road to sapience, and thus was born the Child of our species' Fortune, who from that day unto this has danced the camino real to the Pied Pipes of Pater Pan.

"Yes, before the singer was the song, to which we wandered from apes into men, and I was the horny billy-goat music leading us onward by the compass of our desires, and the Pied Piper urging the Children onward from the dusty streets of Hamelin town into the Magic Mountain of eternal Oz, and so too was I the Minstrel of Aquarius who slew the timebound rule of chairmen of the board and kings.

"When the Children's Crusade of the Ages of the Night set forth in quest of Jerusalem's Holy Grail, they marched to my spirit's song. And I was the Piper of Pan in the garden of the Flower Children that bloomed to my music in a golden Summer of Love.

"When the Arkies embarked upon their wanderings in the endless stellar night, Pater Pan was the Spark that rode their great slow arkologies with them, holding aloft the torch in the darkness of the long light-years and frozen centuries between the stars.

"And when the mages of our species wrested the secret of the Jump from the forgotten lore of We Who Have Gone Before and our Second Starfaring Age began, then did the King of the Gypsies and the Prince of the Jokers sally forth from his long sleep under the Magic Mountain to carry the Spark of the Ark forward wherever Children of Fortune wander the Yellow Brick Road out among the far-flung worlds of men!"

Golden, godlike, blue eyes mirroring the azure depths of the sky, declaiming in a mighty voice that seemed to speak not from him but through him, this marvelous creature seized up his patchwork blouson, whirled it over his head, and draped it grandly about his naked shoulders.

"Voila, the mystery of the Cloth of Many Colors, the Traje de Luces, the Pied banner of the eternal Piper! he shouted in a leonine roar. "Each ragged patch is a piece of transient cloth! Each fragment of the whole is a moment, a face, a piece of time, a smile, a laugh, a companion along the Way! Each in its turn frays and unravels and is replaced by another! Each single patch adorns the banner which has cloaked the spirit of Pater Pan for a million years for a time and then is gone! Not one single thread of the original garment which never was remains! Yet that which is the Traje de Luces itself lives on and on and on!"

He crouched down and regarded me face-to-face, and in that moment I knew not whether I regarded a creature out of legend or a man. "C'est moi," he said in a voice that suddenly seemed a good deal less grand. "This Cloth of Many Colors is me, girl. The eternal spirit and the natural man. An old patch of cloth, and the glorious whole entire, the singer who passes, and the song which goes forever on."

He shrugged, he smiled, he seemed to shrink back into himself like a great flower subsiding backwards in time into the modest bud from which it was born.

"Thus," he said quite conversationally, "the name tale of Pater Pan."

***

Needless to say, I had never before heard a name tale like that! And certainly not one declaimed in such a thespic manner, as if the quotidian man of flesh and blood whom I had shortly before held in my arms had become an actor upon a stage assuming the mantle of a character far greater than himself, vraiment greater than any mortal man, speaking words that another and at the very least more literarily puissant spirit declaimed through him.

On the other hand, even in my state of charisma-drunken awe, I could perceive that Pater Pan had told me nothing about the man of flesh and blood at all and had cloaked the nakedness of this obfuscation in a tapestry of grandiose rhetoric and extravagant poetry no less devoted to confusion and flash than the blouson of Cloth of Many Colors now draped around his lordly corpus like a royal robe. Blarney indeed, but what wonderful blarney it was, how grander than what- ever the unadorned truth of any merely human pedigree could be!

Moreover, even then it seemed to me that some spirit great and true did in fact speak through this marvelous mountebank of a man, for while I could hardly credit the words which boasted of a millennial lifespan at the eternal center of history humain entire, my heart was filled with the higher and less coherent truth of the music of the song.

For as Pater Pan had declared, before the singer was the song, and if the man who sat beside me had long since chosen to subsume his mere pedigree into the higher truth of metaphor, to become the legend of which he sang, who was I to say that mundane veracity was truer to the spirit thereof than literature's noble lies?

May hap I speak thusly not as the young girl who was, but as the teller of tales who is, possessed of both the will to declaim the supremacy of my own chosen fictional art over the truth of mere accuracy, and the mature theoretical basis to put such wisdom into the mind of the girl I then was.

But if this is so, it only serves to speak my meaning the stronger, for the inner truth of the matter is that this was the moment when the heroine of the story took the first step on the road to the becoming of the teller of the tale, which is to say that for the first time in her young life, Moussa Shasta Leonardo had heard the music of a spirit that transported her ambitions beyond the song of self.

Not that I was any less determined to make this man my patron and my lover, to rescue myself from indigence by gaining entry to his tribe; but now pecuniary calculations had merged with the ding an sich, for now my desire was to truly partake of the spirit of what now seemed a noble and glorious enterprise, to become a true Gypsy Joker with the song of the tribe in my heart.

As if possessed of the power to read my spirit, or in more likely point of fact, possessed of the long experience to fully comprehend the effect on such as myself of the performance of his name tale, Pater Pan reverted to his earlier, less daunting, and at the same time more practically minded persona.

"And so," he said, "now that you have impressed me with your secret powers as a lover, and I have impressed you with my noble name tale, what be the down and dirty, girl, what is it that you really want?"

"Why to be with you as you surely must know by now!" I declared with an innocent openness of spirit. "To become a Gypsy Joker! With all my heart!"

Pater laughed. "When it comes to my phallic favors, pas problem, since this much I grant gratuit to all who please me, as you surely must know by now you have," he said. "When it comes to becoming a Gypsy Joker, this you can achieve by crossing my palm with one hundred pieces of ruegelt."

"What?" I shouted, brought crashing down from the clouds of the spirit into the muck of mendacious maya by the outrage of such a demand. "Quelle chose! What kind of man are you to speak thusly to a lover? How dare you --"

"Peace!" Pater Pan declared, holding up his hand and smiling the entirely inappropriate smile of sweet reason. "Surely for a woman such as yourself, possessed of secret tantric powers sufficient to win the exhausted admiration of even the mighty Pater Pan, a mere hundred pieces of ruegelt is nada, a mere token, the earnings of a lazy afternoon ..."

The thrust, as it were, of this discourse brought back all my previous guile. If he insisted on bringing down our congress to the level of the marketplace, then I too could descend to the logic thereof, and we would see which of us would prevail.

"It is your considered expert opinion that I could easily enough earn one hundred pieces of ruegelt in the performance of the tantric arts?" I said in a wondering and innocent tone that, au contraire, emanated in this moment from any- thing but a guileless naif.

"For sure!" my victim declared. "you need only summon up half the pluck you've already shown, and offer up your services on the bourse of the streets. A few discreet caresses gratuit to establish your bona fides and hook the mark, then set your price, and voila!"

"Perhaps you are right," I allowed. "But I am a complete naif in matters of value given for value received. How much ruegelt do you believe I could demand?"

Pater Pan shrugged. "Quien sabe?" he said. "The horniness of the patron, the fullness of his purse, the generosity of his spirit, these are all as relevant as the absolute value of the wares, ne. But always set an initial price of some extravagance, for never will you receive an offer higher than your own best boast. "

"Might I ask two hundred?" I inquired.

"Two hundred!" Pater exclaimed. "you will do no volume trade at such a price. Of course, there are always a few who will be willing to meet it, since your performance is somewhat extraordinaire, as I have just had occasion to learn ..."

"Indeed you have," I said slyly, coiling for the pounce. "I bow to your wisdom, oh Great Spirit of the Bourse. Henceforth I shall set a price of two hundred pieces of ruegelt ..." I paused as if considering the matter. "Henceforth ...?" I mused. "Vraiment, why not right now?"

I held out a demanding palm. "Two hundred pieces of ruegelt, bitte, for the services you have just enjoyed and praised so highly, mon cher!"

Pater Pan's eyes widened in astonishment, his jaw fell open. "What?" he exclaimed. "Pay? Me? You demand two hundred pieces of ruegelt for enjoying the embraces of Pater Pan? Which you yourself have schemed to obtain? What kind of woman are you to speak thusly to a lover?"

And then, hearing his own words mirroring my previous protest of outrage, he broke into raucous and not disapproving laughter.

"A true Gypsy Joker, ne?" I giggled.

He regarded me in arch silence for a moment. Then he shook his head ruefully, but not without the warmest of smiles." A true Gypsy Joker for sure!" he said. "But surely you will not demand two hundred from the domo of your own tribe?"

"From the domo of my own tribe, I would demand nothing at all," I told him. "Vraiment, it was not I who intruded pecuniary considerations into any transaction between us, ne. So let not our love be sullied by the passage of filthy lucre from hand to hand. Consider that my price, even as yours, is one hundred pieces of ruegelt."

I cupped my hands as if to receive just such a sum. "Imagine that you are now counting out the coins ..."

With a laugh, he pantomimed the donation that I required, and with a laugh, I returned the phantom coins to his own outstretched hands.

We giggled. We kissed. We embraced.

Thus by this phantom commerce of the bourse and true commerce of kindred spirits was our bargain sealed. Thus did my life as a Gypsy Joker justly and triumphantly begin.

Chapter 8

It was indeed somewhere under the rainbow, Pater Pan did lead me over the river at the base of the waterfall and through some woods, one could spot an ersatz evening star from its precincts, and if the part about straight on till morning proved to be poetic hyperbole, the circus truly was in town.

Which is to say that despite the prohibition of Child of Fortune favelas on Edoku for understandable esthetic reasons, the Gypsy Jokers had managed to erect and maintain a carnival caravanserei in a choice piece of parkland which lay in perpetual high noon between the arrondissement of glass towers and the rolling residential hills of twilight.

I will never forget my first sight of the encampment from afar as Pater led me toward it along one of the avenues lined with glass towers, an angle of approach he had chosen, as I was soon to learn, for pedagogic as well as esthetic reasons.

A few hundred meters before us, afternoon and the arrondissement of bustling streets ended, and in the far distance the twilit hills formed a dark backdrop sprinkled with the lights of men which entirely outshone the few stars visible in the blackish purpling sky above their crestline. Glowing on the margin of lawn between in the bright light of noon as if purposely highlighted by a celestial spotlight (as in point of fact it of course was) flashed what first appeared to be an immense display of multicolored pennants. A few moments later, I realized that what I saw was a veritable city of tents whose fabric roofs and walls were flapping gently in a light breeze, a wonderful chaos of colors and stripes flung across the parkland like a giant Cloth of Many Colors. As we approached closer, I saw that the tents displayed as great a profusion of forms as hues; there were small closed tents such as might shelter a small camping party, large ones with extravagantly striped sides such as might enclose performers and audience alike, tents that were no more than awnings against the sun, round tents, square tents, oblong tents, tents in a pyramidal shape, und so weiter.

Soon I could make out tiny figures thronging the impromptu streets of the tent city, hear the faint strains of music, catch the aromas of cuisine and incense and intoxicants drifting invitingly towards me on the breeze.

"So, Moussa," Pater Pan said, "what do you see?"

"Xanadu ...?" I suggested breathlessly.

Pater laughed. "So should it appear to the rubes," he said, "and so it does. But now that you are a Gypsy Joker, you must learn to see through streetwise eyes."

I cocked an inquisitive eyebrow at him.

"First, you will notice that the location of the carnival is straight athwart the natural route between this busy commercial district and the houses of the hills. So that those Edojin who stroll between the two rather than use the Rapide must pass within its spell. Conversely, the existence of our carnival along the route between bourse and home encourages such a lazy stroll. One must always grant the rubes the maximum opportunity to discover their whim to part with ruegelt. Now why did I choose noon rather than evening or night?"

I shrugged and held out my hands in a confession of ignorance.

"Because on Edoku, as on most of the worlds of men, evening is the chosen hour for dining on haute cuisine in grand restaurants, and night is the chosen hour of elaborate and expensive spectacles and entertainments, and our quaint shows and simple fare can go mano a mano with neither," he told me. "The clever Child of Fortune caters to immediate whim and caprice, tidbits of food, not haute cuisine, impromptu music, ruespiels, and busking, not formal theater or spectacle, trinkets and geegaws, not noble craft or high art- an thrust under the noses of the rubes before they even recognize the desire for same, and all available at prices which prevent the decision to part with ruegelt from causing significant reflection."

"you make us sound little more than mendicants ..."

"Right on!" Pater exclaimed approvingly. "Sure, and we are little more than mendicants. The mendicant plays upon the pity and empathy of his mark to secure alms but offers nothing of value in return save a certain pompous sense of self-satisfaction, ne. The Child of Fortune offers a little more. We amuse. A laugh, a smile, a savor, a few moments of pleasure, a nostalgic remembrance of a youth when the customer was free and weightless as the breeze, a Child of Fortune even as you and I."

"But that is no little difference at all!" I declared. "For the mendicant plays upon a confrontation with misfortune and makes the donor feel smugly superior, whereas we play upon a confrontation with lost freedom and return a memory of joy, ne. To me, that is all the difference in the worlds." And why, I realized, that come what may, I could never reduce myself to begging for alms.

Pater gave me a strange and narrow look, compounded, or so it seemed, of amazement, approval, satori, perhaps even a certain sense of awe. "Well spoken indeed, my little guru," he said. "The spirit moves through your words, and in retrospect, I now congratulate myself for having the wisdom to know it all along."

And so, basking in the approval of the domo of the tribe, in thrall, in love, pledging my spirit to him and his enterprise in the depths of my loyal young heart, and quite erroneously convinced that I had captured his soul and made him my own as surely as he had made me his, I entered the carnival of the Gypsy Jokers hand in hand with the noble Pater Pan, quite confident that I would be its queen as surely as my man was king.

***

While the former supposition was one of which I was soon to be disabused, the latter was reconfirmed as soon as we entered the camp, for Pater Pan could go nowhere within its precincts without being the center of attention of Gypsy Jokers and Edojin alike, though the mode of homage differed in tone between the two.

As Pater made the rounds of the carnival with myself in train, ostensibly for the benefit of my orientation, but in truth, as I was to learn in the next few days, as part of his regular preening ritual, the Edojin patronizing the divertissements honored the presence of the living legend with sidelong glances, whispered comments to each other, the occasional frank stare, though these burghers of Great Edoku never seemed to favor the Gypsy King with a word or gesture of direct salutation. Nor, for his part, did Pater stoop to acknowledge the groundlings with banter or even direct eye contact, any more than an actor upon a stage would betray cognizance of their existence to the audience.

Vis-a-vis our fellow Gypsy Jokers, it was entirely another matter.

The caravanserei of the Gypsy Jokers encompassed a bewildering profusion of enterprises, and as Pater commended each of them to my attention, he held impromptu court with the maestros and journeymen thereof, questioning and advising, bantering and suggesting, collecting a portion of the take for the common purse or may hap his own, and contriving to introduce the latest member of the tribe casually en passant.

That Pater was in truth the ultimate maestro of each and every art as he pretended was difficult for even the smitten Moussa to credit, but certainement he was deferred to, or at least humored, as such by the practitioners thereof. At food kiosks, he nibbled at tidbits and suggested alterations in the recipes. The wares of jewelers, potters, sculptors, leather- workers, und so weiter, were eyed, fingered, even sniffed at; many were praised, but certain items were ordered removed from the market for lack of sufficient craft, and the subject of the proper price for everything was discussed in some detail.

Pater would try his hand against his own minions at the varied games of chance and skill to be found within the camp, and more often than not would will a small pile of ruegelt which he would pocket with wry admonitions and homilies of gambling lore, praising extravagantly those few who managed to wrest coin from him.

The grounds were also full of buskers of every sort -- musicians, singers, ruespielers, dancers, jugglers, artistes of sleight of hand, und so weiter -- performing gratis or for whatever coins passing Edojin might be moved to toss their way. Pater would take in their performances, and then during an intermission in same, take them aside and offer his advice. Jugglers had roughnesses in their performances pointed out, musicians and singers were referred to colleagues for the enhancement of their repertoires, sleight of hand artistes were shown new tricks, ruespielers were given new variations on old tales.

There were many tents within which tantric tableaus were enacted before audiences, and many more within which the clientele took part in the erotic choreography or enjoyed solo performances in a mode of their own choosing.

Pater not only was quite free with his critiques, not only advised male tantric performers in the niceties of their art (a subject in which I would be the last to declare him less than a master), but saw fit not only to advise tantric artists of my own gender in the means of pleasing his own, but offered to supply private lessons in same more than once under my very nose!

In truth-which is to say sans self-serving dissembling -- if I have conveyed a certain less than enthusiastic attitude on the part of the young Moussa towards Pater Pan's performance of his royal rounds, if I have portrayed him as intruding into every art and enterprise with the self-importance of the kibbitzing dilettante and withheld my wholehearted appreciation of his puissance as a maestro of them all, verisimilitude would also have me own that it was neither the tone of his discourse nor the generality of its reception which soured the edges of my delight at this grand tour of Xanadu, or to be even more painfully forthright about the source of my discomfort, I could find little fault with his conversational congress with the males of our tribe.

These were all younger than my great lover, indisputably callow in my eyes by comparison, and I could only approve of the open-spirited manner. in which they all deferred to him in matters great and small, sought his favor, desired to emulate his noble model, and accepted his advice and teachings even in the subtleties of their own arts with the intellectual avidity of the sincere student.

His behavior vis-a-vis the female of the species and their frank and mooning attentions to him, however, were entirely beyond the-scope of my selfless admiration and approval. Vraiment, in my brief career as a femme fatale of Nouvelle Orlean, I had never been subject to such treatment by a swain, and would have eschewed the further company of any such boor the first time I caught him exchanging fey glances with a lesser female being, though admittedly the techniques of covert theft of amatory attention with which these creatures constantly sought to poach on my preserve were not exactly foreign to my own repertoire.

All the more reason to resent the cooing words with which he was constantly laved, the light chance touches of numerous feminine hands to various portions of his anatomy, the inquiring glances, the intrusion of their corpuses into the intimate aura of his body space, all as if I were not present, or worse, was too much the fool to comprehend the import of this sub rosa mating dance. Pater, moreover, played his part to the hilt, returning amatory banter, playing quite free and easy with his little intimate touches; of hand upon flesh, eschewing not the contact of eye with eye, and in short, openly reveling in his status as cock of the walk.

Most galling, not to say most amazing, of all, the fact that I was forthrightly introduced to one and all as both the newest member of the tribe and a lover fresh from his embrace did absolutely nothing to dissuade his legion of feminine admirers from paying him court in my presence, indeed my rivals for his attentions welcomed me with what even I in my outraged state could not distinguish from sincere friendliness, even while they were clearly offering themselves up to my man!

At length, vraiment at what seemed like interminable length, this disjunctive combination of delightful introduction to the wonders of the carnival and torturous display of universal flirtation, or worse, concluded and Pater ushered me into the sanctuary of his own tent.

Without, this pavilion could not have been mistaken for the dwelling of any other, for the entire tent was constructed of the same Cloth of Many Colors which cloaked the much-sought-after body of Pater Pan, but within, it was a venue of humble simplicity entirely out of keeping with what seemed to me to be his elevated opinion of his own grandeur. Indeed, there was nothing inside the small tent save a large bed constructed of a red velvet cloth flung over a deep nest of branches, a few plain wooden chests, some low tables, and a varied assortment of lighting fixtures which were capable of casting whatever hue and intensity of illumination might suit his mood.

While it was a definite improvement over the parklands and gardens which had been my most recent habitations, it was a far cry from the luxury and charm of my chamber at the Yggdrasil, and I immediately resolved to utilize my own more refined tastes and the plentiful resources so obviously at his command to improve matters at once, for such spartan bachelor quarters were hardly suitable to the conjugal arrangements I so erroneously assumed we would now share.

Pater, flopping on his bed with his hands clasped behind his head in the self-satisfied manner of a sated pasha, nevertheless had the wit to read from my demeanor that something was amiss. "Que pasa, Moussa?" he asked appraisingly.

"I expected a domicile of somewhat higher style from a man who professes to be the perfect master of so many arts ..."

"Au contraire," he said, "possessions are anchors to the spirit, and simplicity is the highest style of all. In the encampment of the Gypsy Jokers I am surrounded by all manner of communal delights. Why hoard treasures like a miser of the spirit? All I really require is this pallet on the floor and light to meet my fancy." He laughed. "Besides, I sleep elsewhere more often than not."

The latter I could well imagine." All very well for the wandering cocksman," I told him, "but now that we are a menage a deux, we shall require furnishings more appropriate to genteel domesticity, ne. You can hardly expect me to share a bed of branches in an empty tent."

At this, Pater sat upright and regarded me first with surprise, then with consternation, and finally with a certain knowing ruefulness. "Whoa, lady, you seem to be laboring under a whole series of misapprehensions," he said not unkindly. He patted the bed beside him. "Setzen sic sich, girl, and receive enlightenment."

I liked the sound of it not at all; nevertheless I did as he asked, though not without a tremor of trepidation, and not without the maintenance of a certain physical distance congruent with my sudden unease.

"You cannot be more than twenty standard years old, ne?" he said. "Whereas I have traveled the worlds of men for millennia ..."

"Such hyperbole is all very well for poetic boastings for the mystification of rubes," I snapped, "but hardly suitable to a serious discussion of matters of the heart en boudoir! No human may attain the age of four hundred, and the scientific reasons therefor have been known for centuries."

"Ah, but I speak of time, not age, Moussa, and in our Second Starfaring Age, these are not bound so tightly together, ne. Greater mysteries aside, we do not slowly decay into dotage as men once did, but all at once, when our nervous systems wear out. So, for all you know, in span of my body's years, I could be three hundred as easily as thirty ..."

"Thirty, three hundred, three thousand, je ne sais pas!" I declared. "What has all this talk of age and time to do with us?"

"All," he said flatly. "Believe it or not, believe at least that 1 believe that I've been around the worlds of men longer than even I can remember. Knowing me as you already do, for sure you can believe that the last several thousands of years were not quite passed in monkish celibacy, which is to say I am far more experienced in affairs of the heart than you, or at least I have known as many .women as you have days."

"Now at least I surmise that you speak sans hyperbole," I admitted dryly.

"Bien. And I tell you true, their spirits were as precious to me in their time as yours is now."

"Spirits?" I sniffed. "you would have me believe you have cherished several thousand lovers for their spirits?"

Pater shrugged. "Am I not a man of great charisma?" he said. "Am I not the cocksman supreme? Do you imagine I am anything less than a perfect master of seduction? Is it not the fact that I am a universal object of feminine desire precisely the cause of your present pique?"

"And modest to a fault as well," I said, hardly able to believe that I had in fact heard such incredible boasting from the lips of mortal man. But unable to deny the obnoxious truth either.

But Pater Pan did not laugh. Instead, his face became a visage of such intense sincerity, he regarded me with a look of such caritas and tenderness, that somehow he managed to make himself seem like a hero for having the spiritual courage to utter the very words which the previous moment had marked him as a boor and a braggart. Never had a man looked at me thusly. Never had a spirit touched mine so deeply or inspired such totally irrational trust. Never had I felt such love.

"Do you imagine that such a man need grant his favors to any who has not touched his heart?" he said.

"It was not precisely your heart that I touched in the shower stall. ..." I reminded him.

Once again, Pater did not so much as smile at my jape, indeed he came as close as I had ever seen to an impatient frown. "Merde, muchacha, be real!" he said. "Do you imagine that I have not been the object of more such ploys than I could count? Do you imagine that my lingam rules my heart? Do you really believe I knew not your true intention, namely to achieve exactly what you have?"

My ears burned. My eyes began to tear. "What a silly little fool you must have thought I was ..." I whispered forlornly. Yet still I could not avert my gaze from the depths of his bright blue eyes.

Nor his from mine, "Fool?" he exclaimed. "Your courage and your guile won my heart!"

"They did?"

Now Pater broke into a boyish grin that made me want to laugh, though I knew not why. "It takes one to know one, n'est-ce pas?" he said. "Have I not lived by just such courage and guile for all these centuries? How could an ego as massive as that of the great Pater Pan fail to love a spirit in which he sees to his delight the mirror of his own?"

Now I did laugh as I felt a great weight lifted from my spirit by his words. Pater sprang from the bed and began pacing as he spoke, or rather declaimed in the thespic style of his name tale, and now as then, a mighty spirit seemed to be speaking through him, but now, via his bright blue eyes which never broke contact with my own, I felt it moving through me as well, as if we were two singers who had become the music of a single song.

"Ah, Moussa, we are two avatars of a single spirit, you and I, sister and brother, and equal lovers, no matter that you have hardly begun to walk the Yellow Brick Road, and I have been the Piper of the dance time out of mind on a hundred worlds and more. Are we not true Gypsies and true Jokers, Children of the same Fortune? That is why you are now in this encampment, not because you knotted my lingam around your finger, but because you out-Joked the Joker, and out-Gypsied the Gypsy, and proved thereby that you belonged to the tribe by droit d'esprit, a Gypsy Joker of the true spirit before you even knew the name!"

Then all at once he collapsed back onto the bed and be. came the mere man and trickster once more." And that is why I am not about to let you live with me in this tent or delude yourself that you or any other woman can be my one and only, girl," he said. "Could I be so heartless as to deprive the women of the worlds of the full glory of my being? Could I be such a jealous churl as to deprive the men of the worlds of the full glory of yours?"

"What a farrago of self-serving merde!" I exclaimed in wounded anger. "What high-sounding rhetoric to justify what low-minded lust!"

Pater only smiled at me warmly in a superior manner that further inflamed my rage against him. "Would not such a low-minded swine of selfish lust play a lower-minded game? Would he not encourage the delusion that, given time and patience and a casual enough disregard for his peccadilloes, you could make him your own?"

"You believe that I would watch you play the stud to the entire barnyard and loyally await my turn at your favors in hope thereby of cozening you into mending your ways?" I snapped.

Pater Pan seemed to stare right into my soul. He placed a gentle hand upon my knee. "Can you look me in the eye and honestly declare that if I had never spoken this truth you would not?" he said all-too-knowingly.

I could not reply. Indeed, I could no longer even meet his gaze.

"How long before such a love turned to hate?" Pater persisted. "Vraiment, even if you caponized the cock, would you not lose as much as I?"

"May I not at least be permitted to be the judge of that?" I muttered bleakly.

Pater cupped my chin in his hands and raised my eyes to meet his own. "So be it, girl," he said. "Suffer one more long-winded koan, after which you have only to say so, and I will be forever yours."

Once more that preternatural spirit seemed to emerge from manly flesh to speak to its own avatar with ill my heart, but now my lover spoke as well, or so it seemed, with a human warmth even I in such a moment could not deny.

"I have known thousands of women on hundreds of worlds and you may hap a few score fellows on a world or two. Yet tell me true if you can that you in your short span have been any more addicted to pacts of eternal monogamy than I!"

At this, I was constrained to merely curl my lips, for of course no such vows had ever passed through them, nor indeed had such thoughts previously even trammeled my admittedly somewhat fickle heart.

"We are Children of the same spirit, ne, you and I," Pater went on relentlessly. "What sort of man, what a false Child of Fortune, would I be to allow a lover to tie herself to me and lose thereby that very spirit which she loves in me, which has made me what I am? Vraiment, to turn her back on the Yellow Brick Road after her first few steps thereon?"

He smiled. He took my hand in his. "Instead, why not a treaty of equal spirits, one Gypsy Joker to another? Take from a lover's hand this carnival, and Edoku, and all the worlds of men beyond. Let me be your lover, and you be mine, but live the life that I have lived, be true to the spirit that we share. Eat, drink, toxicate yourself, wander, learn, adventure, dare all, have ten lovers, a hundred, a thousand, vie with the great Pater Pan in running up the score, and become thereby not my spouse but a true consort of my heart! For what do I lose thereby? What substance is depleted? And you have worlds to gain that I already know. So allow me to give a greater gift than what you seek, chere Moussa, the gift of freedom as my lover and an equal spirit. And in return, only seek not to diminish mine."

I trembled at the touch of his hand, I knew not how to reply, for the greater part of me wished to gather up this wise and noble creature in my arms, while the worm of intellect whispered in my ear that I was somehow only the latest victim of this perfect master of the truthful lie.

"Well?" said Pater. "Which do you choose? Sister and brother of the same free spirit? Or dour misers of the heart?"

Put thusly, was not the question its own answer? Even now, with hindsight's wisdom long years and many lovers after the fact, still I cannot find the flaw in his irrefutable logic d'amour. Nor, on the other hand, can I escape from the entirely illogical conviction that it was there.

I shook my head ruefully, acknowledging that I was in the presence of a perfect master, though of what I was not quite sure. "You have the tongue of an angel and the guile of a Serpent," I told him. "Why then, knowing this, do I now trust such a monster with my heart?"

Pater laughed. He hugged me to him and kissed me on the lips. With a great relenting sigh, I snuggled into his embrace. "Because," he said, "beneath the mythos and blarney of the great Pater Pan, there is nothing more sinister than the soul of a little boy."

***

I slept that night in the arms of Pater Pan, or rather he allowed himself to innocently repose in mine after a somewhat briefer passage d'amour than our first mighty duet, which served, nevertheless, to reaffirm my arcane tantric mastery over his flesh and to reaffirm his primacy, despite all, in my heart, and thus to fairly seal our bizarre "treaty of equal spirits."

Vraiment, in the days and weeks to come we slept together thusly often enough, and if I had given up all hope of becoming the exclusive consort of the cock of the walk, I could content myself with the admission, wrested from his panting lips by the magic of the Touch, that I could, whenever the spirit moved me, not merely please him like no other lover , but overmaster, outlast, and outpleasure this most puissant of cocksmen, and leave him gasping limply and crying "Enough!"

Indeed having established myself in my own mind and his as the secret mistress of the ultimate object of feminine desire in open competition, I began to appreciate the wisdom of the pact he had forced upon me. Though at first I sulked and pouted when I spied Pater engaged in intimacies with others, soon enough I began to take a certain satisfaction in this erotic competition, in which, courtesy of the art of Leonardo, I was assured of certain, if not exactly sporting, victory.

Moreover, once my full confidence in my own erotic puissance had thereby been restored, I regained once more the spirit of that Moussa Shasta Leonardo who had been in her own small way no mean femme fatale of Nouvelle Orlean. I took to denying my favors to Pater from time to time for my own amusement. I dallied with lesser males of the tribe and soon developed a reputation as a tantric performer of preternatural power and some artistry.

Soon enough I was invited to take minor parts in tantric group performances in which the audience participated actively and met with the general approval of same via the raw power of the Touch, though the featured performers would often chide me for upstaging their more demanding roles.

When it came to performing in tantric tableaus in which the audience remained passive spectators, however, I was a good deal less successful, since the employment of the Touch therein did nothing for the audience and tended to disrupt the concentration of the ensemble with ill-timed orgasms, and when I therefore confined myself to ordinary performance of my modest roles, my relative lack of studied artistry was all too apparent.

Nevertheless, the cachet derived from being even a minor and occasional public performer, combined with the electronically enhanced certainty of providing fair value, allowed me to earn some ruegelt as solo tantric artist, though I never summoned up the hubris or courage to demand more than twenty pieces of ruegelt from a customer.

True to his word in letter and spirit, Pater never displayed a moment of jealousy, or indeed anything less than open- hearted enthusiasm for my enterprises and amours, though truth be told my initial motivation had been the eliciting of same. And once I had quite convinced myself that his dedication to the spirit of our mutual freedom was quite genuine and unconstrained, I had to admit to myself that I would have been a fool to have had it any other way.

For it was a grand and glorious time. Having known nothing of life but an existence based on parental largesse and then a period of utter penury resulting from the exhaustion of same, the vie of the Gypsy Jokers was more to me than a garden of delights, it was my very first experience of a world in which I was neither the darling daughter nor the helpless waif but a free, equal, and independent agent. The strip of Cloth of Many Colors that I wore sometimes as scarf, sometimes as sash, sometimes as headband, was purchased with ruegelt earned by my own efforts, as were the simple meals I bought in the camp in lieu of fressen bars. While the former was hardly an item of haute couture and the latter could not pretend to haute cuisine, I was adorned with the ensign of my own enterprise and dined on the fruits thereof.

I was Moussa Shasta Leonardo, Gypsy Joker, true avatar of the spirit of the Child of Fortune, a free and equal lover of Pater Pan, and indeed he had seen my future self truly, for having attained this station, never would I have then willingly traded it for being the mere consort of even the noblest of men.

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